Introduction Cedar Creek is situated within the basin-shaped Samford Valley. This creek is made up of a granitic intrusion that has been slowly weathered and eroded over time (SERF, 2012).This creek system and its water flow seeps into the surrounding rock and slowly weathers this creating deeper runs of water and wider bends etc. Chemical weathering also affects this creek system with different minerals (feldspar in this case) in the granodiorite being broken down causing different chemical compositions. Porous weathered rocks are important in the sense that they store nutrients that can be passed onto invertebrates and plants within the creek system. Before calculating the porosity of the rocks in Cedar Creek we are able to hypothesize …show more content…
This was proven directly through the experiment and analysis of the class data. It can be seen in figure 1 that the data directly shows the porosity rising and the gypsum being created through the reaction. There was an obvious interaction found between the relationship of basanite and gypsum vs porosity. When the H2O is added to the reaction of the basanite it is seen that the porosity rises as well (as seen in figure 1) which is what causes gypsum to occur. Through analysis it can also be seen that the pellets that had been created under lower pressure were seen to have a higher porosity. This can be seen in figure 3 where the trend shows directly that this is correct and that the lowest pressure correlates with the highest porosity. This also links back to the initial statement of the higher the porosity, the higher the gypsum as the water needed to infiltrate the basanite would not need to be as high if the porosity is high. This porosity is also seen in the Samford Valley when we had attended the field trip. Plagioclase feldspar is directly related as we saw that the higher along the bank the rock was situated, the higher the porosity and therefor in turn an increase in hydraulic …show more content…
When looking at porosity, it refers to the amount of space not occupied within the item (in this case pellet). When looking into the space not occupied by the gypsum or basanite it can be seen that if more pressure is added initially to the pellet, there will be less volume left to be occupied therefor a lower porosity. There were also a few outliers which would have been caused by human error through the experimental testing. One main issue was the data being skewed from the wrong heat used by the ovens for the first practical which essentially ruled that data as unusable. There were also a few groups with incorrectly displayed data which is what may have caused some of these outliers. When looking directly at the mass of the pellets pre and post experiment it was noticed that the mass changed in regards to the porosity directly. In figure 2 it can be seen that as the porosity percentage increases, it in turn increases its mass. This would be due to the reaction causing the basanite to hold the molecules of water and bonding them causing the mass to increase. It can also be seen that the more porous pellets held more of the water which was due to their higher